The literalness of Glenn Kaino’s recent work is surprising. His midcareer retrospective “A Shout Within a Storm,” on view through April 22, includes the work The Winds of Revolt (Selma) 2, 2016, in which Kaino has rendered in charcoal on a waxed paper ground an iconic 1965 photograph of Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, and other civil rights leaders marching arm in arm. Heat applied to the upper part of the composition has caused wax to drip down, partially distorting the image. In The Past Has Not Yet Happened (Panama), 2017, Kaino used a tactile alcohol transfer process to degrade the appearance of an antique map. There is no missing the point of these heavy-handed exhibition didactics: Don’t allow past social-justice strides to fade, The Winds of Revolt seemingly insists; geopolitical boundaries are violently wrought, The Past Has Not Yet Happened ostensibly contends. Message received, but the work itself doesn’t have much bite.

Occurring on the heels of a show of entirely new work at Kavi Gupta in Chicago, this exhibition marks a stark shift in Kaino’s practice from the poetic to the prosaic. Yet the motive for this change is unclear. An example of a lyrical earlier work is Excalibur 2, 2014 (which is not part of the display at the Contemporary Arts Center): The efficacy of the sculpture, a trompe l’oeil–painted bronze slingshot, is foiled due to its projectile pocket being embedded in a wall. Excalibur 2 could be viewed as symbolic of individual struggles against oppression (think David and Goliath), or as a potential source of empowerment, if only someone stepped forth to wrest the slingshot from its confines. A Shout Within a Storm, 2014, which does figure among the two dozen works featured in the show, consists of a suspended conical arrangement of uniform, laterally oriented copper-plated steel arrows that converge in space at a point positioned at the height of the average viewer’s head. The work exudes the appearance of arrested energy. The viewer can look at A Shout from behind the cone’s base, thus positioning herself as part of the storm of arrows, or she can position herself at the cone’s apex, subject to its deadly force (unless one were to halt its onslaught with an outstretched hand). A hint of the imaginative remains in Sign (A Pen for Every Player), 2017. A Chippendale-style three-drawer writing desk with two legs removed from one of its short sides sits askew in the gallery space. Numerous plaster casts of holstered pens—like those found in banks and post offices—radiate from the center of the table, which is occupied by what seems to be a plaster cast of a stack of paper. In a one-minute video projected on an adjacent wall, one sees the sculpture in another space. Kaino enters the frame and briefly lifts the table to an erect, balanced position, his legs standing in for the absent table legs. The wall label tells us that this gesture consequently temporarily alleviates the human burden that is the table-destabilizing by-product of treaties and executive actions made and signed with pens like these on tables like this. As in A Shout, the artist wants us to feel like we are part of the art: Could we, too, lift the table? But in watching Kaino do so, one wonders: Is he truly lifting the burden of oppression? Or, in propping up an oppressive apparatus, is he (are we) simply reinforcing power structures and our own complicity in them?

A similarly ambiguous political message manifests throughout Kaino’s prolonged engagement with the legacy of Tommie Smith and the athlete’s podium protest at the 1968 Summer Olympics, when Smith and John Carlos performed the Black Power salute. Pieces related to this multimedia project—for instance, Untitled (Bridge), 2017—constitute a considerable portion of the retrospective. Kaino, who initially wished to work outside the commercial gallery system, has since turned to the “changemakers” of Kickstarter to raise funds for a related initiative to host drawing workshops for children; their sketches will be made into a stop-action animation that will be included in a documentary about Smith that Kaino is codirecting. Our clicking “Back this project” is a popular capitalist sign of support that makes us part of this venture. But is this just another lackluster gesture?

—Jeffrey Saletnik